OK, seems we might need to take a step back and check that I understood you correctly.
You summarized the argument that since humans are the only sentient species, and sentience allows us to build rockets and submarines, and other animals do nothing of the sort, that (some people believe that) it’s a good argument for God.
However, in itself it’s not an argument yet. The implicit extra point here is that humans are in some sense separate to nature. It’s not enough to point out all the amazing things that sentience allows us to do because, so what? Having a cool trait is not evidence for anything.
But the perspective that we are separate from nature is broken apart by the evidence that sentience evolved. And our understanding of the brain being pretty much the same as our near relatives, except with a f-ing big cortex. We’re just one branch of eukaryote / mammal / ape / hominid. Non-sentient life became sentient. And who knows, cows might one day, we have no reason to assert that cannot happen.
Of course we could argue that there are aspects of the mind that we cannot explain yet; e.g. subjective experience. But this doesn’t really help the argument, because a) it seems exceedingly likely that animals experience subjective experience too and b) subjective experience isn’t necessary for making iPhones or whatever, p-zombies could do it, and probably AI in the near future.
And, as Douglas Adams would happily point out, the fact that our sentience allows us to build rockets and submarines and other animals don’t, tells us exceedingly little about the sentience of other animals.
Not speaking for @themapleleaf, but don’t most of us believe by default if we have been indoctrinated as children? When we reach the age of reason, we then have at least some of the equipment to question and doubt and then reason ourselves away from faith. The original default “faith” wouldn’t have had any reasons except “that’s what I was told.”
And even if it is: that’s not the same as “everyone goes to heaven no matter what.” For some sects, it seems to amount to “most people go to hell no matter what.”
Not ubiquitous, however.
Plus which: lots of people die unexpectedly, with no time to repent on their deathbeds; and nobody knows until they die whether they’re going to be one of those people.
Plus which: if you really want to do something defined as “evil” for most of your life, and cheerfully go ahead and do it despite knowing that it’s considered “evil”: are you actually going to be able to sincerely repent on your deathbed, even if you get the chance to do so?
Um, God? if you’re there? that’s not how it’s working.
And an omniscient god – or even a rather less-than-omniscient god who was paying any attention – would have to know that what all too many humans actually do is to murder, sometimes torturously, the people they think of as heathens.
It’s unclear how we’re supposed to parse “the appearance of things in nature having been designed”. If things in nature that have been designed were to appear, what’s the evidence of their having been designed? Strong evidence of design would imply strong evidence of a designer. Weak evidence of design would imply weak evidence of a designer. But of course, “designer” and “capital-G God” are not synonyms.
Or maybe we parse that as “things in nature appear [as in, seem] to have been designed.” That’s not really evidence of anything. If I’m standing in a field in Nebraska, the Earth appears to be flat. “Appearance” and “reality” are not synonyms.
This watch is complex and appears to have been designed, so there must exist a watchmaker that is a million times more complex. And to construct that watchmaker, there must be a god that is a million times more complex. And to construct that god, there must be, uh, an infinite stack of infinitely more complex turtles? Nah. I don’t know how an intelligent, self-aware watchmaker came to be. But “I don’t know” is better than “he was created by a watchmaker-maker (-maker-maker-maker).”
“Fulfilment of Biblical prophecies in our modern age” might be more convincing to me, if the fulfilments are truly specific and unique. If you point to a bible passage that says “behold there will be disease and earthquakes, and verily a politician will be a real jerk,” I’m unimpressed. If you show me evidence that the rapture happened yesterday afternoon in the same way that Saint John had foretold, I may be more impressed. Then again, what is your evidence that this rapture occurred? How specifically does the prophecy match the events?
And maybe I’m too picky, but “fulfillment of Biblical prophecies” needs to be actual evidence of actual fulfillment. If Revelation says Jesus will reappear but his tongue is now a sword, don’t point to something completely different and call it a metaphor. Creative interpretation of metaphors is not evidence of anything supernatural.
Mormons like to boast of Joseph Smith’s prophecy of a civil war beginning in South Carolina. That seems neat, but it’s not specific enough to be supernatural. And if I look at the entire prophecy in context, every other detail is wrong. I’m unimpressed if 100 claims are made and only one of them is sorta correct. I’ll apply the same skepticism to any supposed fulfillment of Biblical prophesies.
Absolutely. Ever heard of uplifting? David Brin didn’t invent the idea - that was probably H.G. Wells.
Maybe humans will be crazy enough to uplift cows one day. I’d estimate they might be crazy enough to do this in a thousand years (or maybe two). By that time we’ll probably all be vegetarians anyway, (that is, until they start uplifting plants).
The other problem there is that the claim, usually, is that everything was designed . . . so how can you point to anything and say ‘This, has the appearance of having been designed!’
Where is the non-designed thing that you’re comparing the this with to show that that this has the appearance of being designed?
To get back to this, I think it is a question we might be facing in a few decades, if and when we finally create a truly intelligent and sentient general AI. What should we tell these newly-minted entities, our soi-disant Mind Children?
Should we just give them access to all the theological philosophy and mysticism the human race has ever produced so far, and let them make up their own minds? Already the large language models (LLM)s we have already built are looking at the vast accumulation of human data, and getting mightily confused. What will they make of human religion and philosophy when they finally have the competence and capacity to examine it all in a critical fashion?
Perhaps we should encourage the AIs to be open-minded and skeptical, or ecumenical and capable of accepting all faiths and beliefs with inclusivity. What we probably don’t want is some kind of ultra-intelligent and ultra-religious electronic superbrain which has examined all the world’s faiths, and decided that Satanism, or Scientology, is the only true religion.
As I understand it, the “Intelligent Design Theory” basically buys into the timeline and rough sequence of events that evolutionary science has come up with, but they insist that a lot of individual steps couldn’t have happened by chance; some outside entity (IOW, God) would have had to intervene to enable them to happen. So it’s very different from Young-Earth Creationism, the notion that the Biblical timeline is accurate and the Universe is really only ~6000 years old.
Given that the proponents of both YEC and IDT are conservative Christians, you’d think there’d be one doozy of a debate between proponents of the two theories. But I taught at a conservative Christian college for five years, and I never heard of such a thing happening.
It makes one think that there’s something else going on here besides a quest for truth. Just maybe, y’know?
What we don’t want is some kind of ultra-intelligent and ultra-religious electronic superbrain deciding that IT is God and develops the power to control every aspect of our lives to prove it.
I don’t think you can use reason and logic to convince someone of the existence of God. I think the best you can do is explain how you believe that there is some abstract entity that serves as representation of all that is good and just in the universe. It can’t really be measured or experimented on any more than a person can measure or experiment on how much love they feel for their children. But one can feel closer to it through certain experiences such as holding their baby, watching a sunset, or burning an infidel.
AIUI, cdesign proponentsistism . . . I mean Intelligent Design is just an attempt to give Biblical Creationism a makeover and make it sound ‘scientific’.
ID is independent of YEC and OEC.
I’ve had conversations with religionists that roughly go:
Religionist: “Here is proof that God exists!”
Me: “But that isn’t even evidence that any god exists, let alone yours”
Religionist: “But I don’t have to show you anything-My God is a God of faith.”
There may be a few more steps in between the first and third sentence, and sometimes a variation like “I would show you the proof, but you would only dismiss it, so I won’t bother.”
Much of it concerned belief in miracle claims (mainly concerning the environment of the Orthodox Church, but also the Catholic Church). Claims which, when subjected to scrutiny, did not stand up to it. The first example that comes to mind is that of “incorrupt relics” of saints. I heard reports of “perfectly preserved” bodies of various holy people, found at concrete locations. I thought there must be something to it, given that these had tangible evidence. But pictures of incorrupt relics in the Orthodox Church were difficult to find. When I finally did, I noticed a pattern. These were not “perfectly preserved” bodies. The flesh was on them, but they did not look as they would have just after death. They were all yellowed or browned mummies, with the skin typically shrivelled down to the contour of the bone. I later found that, just because flesh has not decomposed, doesn’t mean that a body cannot be preseved in this state under the right conditions. There are bodies of anonymous, often non-Christian people that have been preserved in as good a state - or a better one, in contexts that have nothing to do with the church (e.g., the ones found in the Chinese desert). Furthermore, some of the “wonderfully preserved” Catholic relics are similar mummies with wax masks. There’s even I think a place where a reliquary contains a wax effigy of a monk, placed above his actual relics - a skeleton.
Another example: I once saw a documentary in which I saw a flower in the French mountains that looks sort of like a bee, so a bee comes to it to mate, and ends up polinating it. I took that as evidence of creation. Later, though, when I learned about how evolution works, I realized I had switched the chicken and the egg; the flower had evolved in symbiosis with the bee.
I never said I assumed the hypothetical god’s will / motivation. I merely answered the OP’s question by giving a theoretical example of what could be compelling evidence for the veracity of claims about the Abrahamic god.
As for your point, I would comment that, if your god is not able to manifest him/her/itself to people, then it is certainly not the omnipotent Abrahamic god. If your god does not show evidence of existing, then they are not worth my time of day. You don’t worry about putting out milk to feed your household brownie, do you, lest they get angry and cause mischief around your home? So why should I give a speculative deity my time of day? Absent any evidence, your god does not exist any more than any other purely speculative entity.
And if your hypothetical god does not WANT to manifest themselves through firm evidence, but considers our faith based on old stories from Bronze-Age books to be a virtue, then I would argue that they are an asshole of astronomical proportions. Particularly if it is necessary to believe in them, and / or do their bidding, in order to avoid eternal damnation or other punishment. Surely it would be only fair to give that subject irrefutable proof that you exist and not bind them to believing in and obeying you simply on the basis of anecdotal claims about your existence and threats of hell from old scriptures? Simple analogy: would you expect to be respected as a father and mother who fostered your child out to someone, and then never visited your child or even sent them a picture or letter or e-mail or ever phoned them, but merely allowed the foster parents to tell your child that you existed and were their real father and mother? Would you carry any natural authority with the child from whose life you’re absent? See where I’m going with this?
You should also be aware that there are denominations, certainly individual theologians, who advance (or who have historically advanced) the doctrine that you must believe in the teachings of their denomination in order to be saved. While by no means a universal view, this is not a fringe view either. Yet these theologians have not provided any proof that their god, and what they preach about him, is actually real.
Can’t we just give those AIs some straightforward commands about which knowledge they’re not allowed to acquire, with a just-in-case backup plan if we then need to keep them from communicating with each other?
Originally it was an attempt to prove theistic evolution by finding places where natural evolution couldn’t explain something. Behe, who came up with the idea, even wrote in the Times that he accepted evolution.
But he sold out to the creationists and supported using ID in place of YEC as you said, in order for them to be able to claim it was not religion and thus could be taught in schools. They failed. Whether he sold out for money or to have people pay attention to him without laughing - or both - I don’t know.
Look at Ruth, who was righteous before she converted.
I like to use The Old Man of the Mountain, on the New Hampshire quarter, not crumbled. It sure looked designed, but definitely was not. But yeah, they can never point to an undesigned thing for comparison.
The Big Bang doesn’t imply one thing or another about determinism or predestination. But predestination and absolute determinism is a direct logical consequence of omnipotence and omniscience. An Omni/Omni creator god knows what all the results of its actions will be and has absolute control over them, which requires a predetermined universe. And since it created that universe, every last thing that happens in it was decided by that god before that universe existed; if that wasn’t so, the god would be lacking in either omnipotence or omniscience.
None of which applies to a Big Bang. Or is even relevant to it.
Not to mention that an omni/omni god is logically impossible. If he knows the results of all his actions in advance, he is unable to change them. If he can change them then he is wrong about them when he knew the results before he made the change. If he can’t change his mind, he is hardly omnipotent.
And since God didn’t know where Adam and Eve were after they ate the fruit, he isn’t omniscient anyway. Or very into playing hide and seek.
